The Obama-Maliki Plan for Iraq

In some ways it isn't even fair. Barack, of course, has always been an ace student. George W. Bush's approach to scholastics has always been "aspirational," as in the song "Don't Know Much:"

(bridge)
Now I don't claim
to be an A student,
but I'm tryin' to be
I think that maybe by bein'
an A student, baby,
I could win your love - for -me-e...

Thus, George's adult continuing education, reading all those books that more diligent college students read about forty years ago. Such as books on the Middle East, where the fundamental schism between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, occurring some fourteen hundred years ago, is discussed in depth. Book learnin' is not always completely irrelevant to real life, after all. If you want to assess the probability that sectarian conflict will emerge after you remove the police state mechanism (Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party) which held it in check for a generation or so, you would first have to know that there are Sunni and Shiite sects in Islam. Extra credit on the exam could be earned by booking hard on the topic of where in Iraq you might find concentrations of Iraqis of one religious stripe or the other; say, for example, Karbala and Basra for the Shia and Tikrit and Western Iraq for the Sunni. To nail that 4.33 GPA you need these days for Harvard or Stanford, you could show off by learning that the northern Kurds are an ethnically distinct people within Iraq, non-Arab, with trans-border affiliations in Turkey and Iran, and who consider themselves a state separate from Iraq.

George looked at the map and saw one word: Iraq. In Iraq lived good, decent, hard-workin' people just like us, and they wanted freedom because Freedom is God's gift from the Almighty (slightly redundant, but the point can't be made too strongly). In other words, they wanna be free (hold hands in front of chest, thrust slightly forward). Also, because we're Good, we came with Good intentions, and we would be welcome forever because freedom-lovin' peoples the world over love havin' us around.

If Mr. Bush's historiography and ethnic analysis sound strikingly reminiscent of old ideas of your own, it's probably because such ideas were current in social studies classes in the United States in the 1950's-1960's, when in the fourth grade or so you learned about "the world." George Bush could not be immune from such ideas because at that age you're in class, you hear it, you internalize it, the teacher's an authority figure, quod erat demonstrandum. Since you read this blog from time to time and know its ideological bias, you probably moved on in life to disturb such comforting ideas about your "homeland" by reading seditious tracts by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Scheer, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, and watched such movies as "Dr. Strangelove," "Born on the Fourth of July," "Seven Days in May," "Network," and "Platoon," and therefore began to develop a more nuanced view of your patrimony. Which is another way of saying that the erstwhile purity of your patriotism became somewhat tainted by contrarian views, and you perhaps emulated Albert Camus in his assessment of France: "I love my country, but I love it in justice."

I don't think this process happened with George W. Bush. It is a somewhat established thesis in the literature of addiction treatment that emotional development is arrested at the point that serious chronic abuse begins. From late adolescence on George drank hard and often and got into other drugs as well and went through the motions of college education and graduate school while under the influence, until finally at the age of forty he gave the stuff up and began to make real progress in his life. For which he is to be commended. At that point, however, he had wasted over half his life and thrown away all the amazing advantages which his rich and powerful birth simply handed him, like all the best schools and a head start in business.

Yet an adult awakening and renaissance is not as good as diligence and perseverance early in life. You will not find many concert pianists, for example, of the very first rank who started playing the instrument at forty. Okay, you won't find any. You simply can't develop the mind-muscle coordination, the sight reading capability, the patience for repetition that are possible at six or seven years old. Ingenious people who are indifferent about school often go on to be great innovative businessmen or artists (maybe most artists, in fact), but George W. Bush is not an ingenious man, not at all. For him competence depended on diligence and discipline and he simply never learned these intellectual habits when they are best acquired. It is often said about Bush that he is not "intellectually curious." Another way of describing this phenomenon is that he never learned how to learn and he is stuck with an old bagful of tired and sterile ideas.

So then comes Barack, the academic superstar, the quick learner, the adaptive genius. Don't underestimate him for a moment. The dude is very, very, very sharp. He does know how to learn. For him reality is a source of new data, all the time, to be assessed, processed and synthesized into new ideas. When he gets back from Afghanistan and Iraq (brilliant move to go there, by the way), he will announce innovative ideas on how to move forward, ideas of his own conception and initiative.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki likes Barack Obama for more than his name. Now he has a guy he can actually work with. George Bush wears people out because of the utter tedium of his cliched approach. Nothing can penetrate his ossified conceptions; he can't see things from your perspective because he doesn't know how to adapt and he's not intellectually interested enough in your problems to think them through. The sad fact remains that, try as he might, Bush simply cannot fake his way through his intellectual inadequacies. It just isn't there, he doesn't have it in him, and more than anything else, this country needs someone who does.